Banderas and Madonna kiss up

LOS ANGELES -- The last time Antonio Banderas and Madonna shared the screen was five years ago in her documentary Truth or Dare. She was on the rocks with her then-beau Warren Beatty, and in one notorious scene, she hit on Banderas. He declined her favors and remained true to his wife.

An awkward introduction. Much has changed in the interim. Madonna, of course, has become the most famous mother since her namesake. And Banderas has reaped his own share of tabloid headlines by dumping his wife for Melanie Griffith. Now they've collaborated to bring to the screen the long-awaited film version of Evita, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's vastly successful musical about the legendary Eva Perón. Were there some rough moments getting together after their uncomfortable first meeting?

"It's left in the past," says Banderas. "We just laughed about it. It was not a problem. I feel proud that I worked with Madonna at this time of her life. I thought that Evita was for her a kind of therapy. Because there are certain points in both lives that are similar. The fact that both have come from the bottom to the top, have had to battle love and hate, incredible poverty, and then even more incredible popularity -- I think she had to bring truth on the table to play this character, and she did. That's what I discovered in this Madonna. In her other film performances there is a little bit of distance. Here she goes inside, disturbing herself, to pull out something awesome."

"It was great working with him," says Madonna of her screen reunion with Banderas. "That was the first time I met him, and over the years we became friends. By the time that we actually worked together, we'd been friends; it's just that the world didn't know about it. "

Madonna agrees with Banderas that she and Evita share certain similarities. "I think that we're both courageous," she says. "We're both fighters and determined and hard-working. I think we're both terribly misunderstood, envied. I think that because I lost my mother at a young age and that Eva grew up without a father there's a certain kind of sadness that I can relate to that she had, growing up without a parent." Yet the star sees differences as well: "I think I probably had more of a formal education than she did. And let's face it, things are a lot easier for women where I come from at the time that I grew up than they were for her. She had many more odds against her. And I think, for the most part, the changes she brought about in Argentina were in the name of her husband, and the imperialist regime, whereas I don't stand for any particular government or political party."

The politics were a bigger issue for Banderas, who grew up under the dictatorship of Franco in Spain. He plays Ché, the story's sardonic, proletarian narrator. Identified in the stage version of Evita as the revolutionary Ché Guevara, the character is a more generic everyman in the film.

"We didn't use the icon of Ché Guevara because that would have made the film a confrontation between two political ideologies, which it is not," he says. "But inside me I was portraying Ché Guevara before he knew he was going to be Ché Guevara. This guy has political principles completely against those of Evita. Yet he's attracted to her.

"I remember watching Evita in 1975 in Spain, still under the dictatorship of Franco, and it was so fresh and so new. It inspired me to want to go into acting. I started doing theater when I was 14 years old, and Franco was still in power. We hated and feared him. But the day he died, I cried, and I didn't know why. That's pretty much the paradox I approached with my character."

-- PK